“What makes you think I intend to let her go?” Syla asked, reptilian lips curving up in a mimicry of mirth.
“Because I’ve asked you for her,” he said. “And I won’t ask twice.”
Wow, Dad’s a bad ass. Who knew?
Without looking at me, Lyrus said, “Fetch me the book on her bed.” Syla looked alarmed for a second before she mastered her emotions again.
I stepped forward and Syla made a twitching motion with her hand that stopped me in my tracks.
“You do not want to bring this fight here,” Lyrus said. “Not here and not with me.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Marus move.
“Lyrus,” I cried, and he turned to meet the threat, holding up his hand like a traffic cop.
Marus fell as if he’d run head-first into a concrete wall.
Syla didn’t react.
“The book,” Lyrus said.
I nodded and took another step toward the bed. Syla made that odd twitching motion with her hand again and this time I felt a cold hand clutch my heart. I cried out and she smiled. Lyrus glanced at me and in the instant his attention was off Marus, the witch-boy sent a bolt of some sort of energy at him. It bounced off Lyrus and rebounded on him.
As the energy hit him, Marus exploded into a million pieces. There was no blood, only a faint spray of what looked like brackish water.
That did get a reaction from Syla.
“Marus,” she screamed and ran to his remains, trying to gather them up as if they were ashes spilled from a hearth.
I could feel an implacable pity radiating from Lyrus. He hadn’t wanted to kill Marus but he felt no guilt either.
She looked up at us and spat, and where her spittle hit the floor, it sizzled.
“You’re just like her,” she said to me, nodding at the book in my arms. “Always wanting what was mine.”
“Is that why you drove her to kill herself?” I asked. “By kidnapping me and Hugh?”
“You were meant to be killed. I did not know the mortal I trusted to the task would be so tenderhearted as to let you live.”
She said this casually, as if my continued existence was a total nuisance to her.
“Why?” Lyrus asked her.
“Because I loved you and you loved her.”
He shook his head. “There was never any love in you,” he said. “You coveted my talent but that was all.”
“We were twins,” she said. “As alike as peas in a pod.”
“You were nothing alike,” he said. “Your evil made you ugly.” He glanced at me, saw that I had picked up the book he sought. “My daughter and I are leaving now,” he said. “We won’t see you again.”
She looked bewildered for a moment. “But…you can’t leave me here alone.”
Her plea came out as a whine.
“You’re free to go back to the mortal world,” he said. “I was wrong to deny you that passage.”
“But I want to go back to the land of light.”
He shook his head. “That border will remain closed to you forever.”
Her disbelief slowly morphed into fury. “I will kill you, Lyrus.”
Lyrus did not look particularly alarmed by that threat.
“Farewell, Syla.”
In answer, she curled her fingers and then gestured like she was unleashing a fast ball over home plate.
Straight at me.
I felt the tattoo on my hip pulse with heat and instinctively brought the book up to shield my face.
Whatever dark magic she had flung at me hit her Book of Secrets instead.
“No,” she screamed as the book disintegrated, just as Marus had.
“No,” I echoed, realizing my instinctive action might have doomed Allard to a life trapped in a beastly body. Nononononono.
Syla took a step forward and Lyrus muttered a few words that stopped her.
She crumpled to the floor in utter defeat. “My book,” she said. He said nothing.
I was left with empty hands and a burning pain on my hip.
“Come,” Lyrus said, ushering me out of the cottage ahead of him. I was glad to have him at my back because I was sure the furious witch was going to loose a few more lightning bolts at us in parting. But no such magical attack came, and when we left the house, we found Geweih, the silver-horned stag, waiting for us.
Lyrus helped me mount, then got up behind me.
“Take us home,” he said and the animal obeyed.
We traveled in silence for a little while, and then I said, “It might have been kinder to kill her.”
My father snorted. “You mortals are much too sentimental.”
His voice was cold and I shivered.
***
Though there was no border that I could see, I knew the moment we crossed from the Verge into the fae-lands. Everything suddenly seemed more vivid, like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when everything transforms from black and white to color.
Geweih picked his way along a path of mossy stones that wound between dozens of little lakes fringed with a riot of wildflowers. We eventually came to the foot of a granite mountain incongruously topped with snow although the air was very warm.
“It snows here?” I asked, surprised.
“No,” he said, looking up at the snow as if he hadn’t seen it before. “That is just a bit of magic.”
“Set decoration,” I said but he didn’t seem to understand what I meant, so he didn’t answer.
There was a cave-like opening hidden behind a barrier of rose bushes filled with great double blossoms. The stag moved through the bushes as if the thorns were made of rubber and totally harmless.
He stopped at the entrance so we could get off his back and then Lyrus sent him off with an affectionate slap to his flanks. Geweih gave him such an adoring look I thought he might roll over for a belly rub.
I don’t know what I expected a fairy’s home to look like. Maybe something like Rivendell from Lord of the Rings. This was not that.
Lyrus’ home was carved out of living rock covered in moss so thick it looked like green fur. It was filled with fantastical furniture crafted from woods I didn’t recognize and hides from creatures whose names I couldn’t begin to guess.
But I wasn’t there to gawk at my surroundings like I’d just rented a particularly exotic Airbnb. “Where’s Allard?” I asked.
Without looking at me, Lyrus said, “I will take you to him but then you must go.”
Go?
“I’m not going anywhere until I know he’s okay.”
Lyrus did look at me then. “Nothing good will come of it, Hildegarde.”
“That’s not really your decision to make, is it?”
I was starting to get the hang of this “standing up for myself” thing.
“Come then,” he said.
We found Allard lying on a bed in a tower that was part of a massive Sequoia tree. Dozens of the little firefly fairies were in attendance and when Lyrus entered the tower, their color changed from purple to a deep green. It seemed to be some sort of gesture of respect, for after Lyrus nodded gravely in response, their color returned to “normal.”
Allard looked peaceful, but he was so still it looked like he was laid out on a bier rather than sleeping. He had been draped to the neck in a living coverlet woven of wildflowers and butterfly wings and his long fur was braided with more flowers. Absurdly, I thought of a Pinterest page I’d once seen that was devoted to pictures of men with flowers in their beards.
“Allard,” I said softly, moving to the side of his bed. He did not stir, but several of the butterflies on his coverlet were agitated by my presence and rose to dance around my face as if scolding me for disturbing his sleep.
His arms lay outside the coverlet and I picked up one of his hands and held it in both of my own.
There was an old scar on his palm, the remnant of a horrible injury. I kissed an irregular, raised mark. “Come back to me,” I whispered but there was no response.
I don’t know how long I stood there before Lyrus spoke.
“If he could be brought back to us by sheer force of will, your devotion would have achieved that goal already.”
I turned to smile at him, knowing he meant the words kindly even though they held no comfort at all.
“Hope springs eternal,” I said, just to say something to fill the silence between us and the hollow feeling growing in my belly.
He frowned. “Hope,” he repeated, as if it were an unfamiliar word, and then he said it again with a different inflection but no real feeling.